Sure, you got a great education from top schools, and you’ve been working for awhile now. But as you get deeper and deeper into your career, it can become easy to stop pushing yourself to acquire new skills or retain what you’ve already learned.

The Khan Academy, an online learning nonprofit backed by powerful investors and organizations like the Gates Foundation and Google, is a great way to keep expanding your knowledge, regardless of your age or educational background. The site features hundreds of free courses across a wide variety of subjects, consisting of video lectures and exercises.

We asked Salman Khan, founder, executive director, and lead tutor of Khan Academy, for the top 10 lectures professionals in any industry would appreciate, and included them below.

Not every lecture is the first one in its respective series, but Khan thinks each is a good indicator of whether you’d like to spend more time going through all the videos and exercises in that course.

See if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

Why you should take it: You’re wondering if you have what it takes to start your own business, or would simply like to know how the world’s best executives run their companies.

What you’ll learn: See how Musk is finding a way to revolutionize the automobile and space travel industries.

Khan Academy’s extensive interviews with entrepreneurs series also includes talks with Richard Branson, chairman of the Virgin Group, and Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s senior VP of retail and former CEO of Burberry.

Learn basic skills needed for running a business.

Why you should take it: You have an entrepreneurial spirit, but the idea of balancing the books terrifies you.

What you’ll learn: This lecture is the first in a series on the most important accounting and financial statements that you’ll need as a business owner. You’ll learn all that’s required to properly manage your company’s finances.

According to a new working paper from Harvard Business School, setting aside 15 minutes to write at the end of the workday is enough to make you better at your job.

“When people have the opportunity to reflect, they experience a boost in self-efficacy,” says HBS professor Francesca Gino. “They feel more confident that they can achieve things. As a result, they put more effort into what they’re doing and what they learn.”

In a series of laboratory and field experiments, Gino and her colleagues found that reflection leads to better performance. The most telling example comes from their field experiment with an Indian outsourcing company called Wipro.

The researchers put new employees into groups where people either reflected on their days or didn’t. In the reflection group, employees were given a paper journal and asked to spend 15 minutes at the end of their workdays writing about what went well that day, which they did for 10 days.

The result: The journaling employees had 22.8% higher performance than the control group.

“In the field study, we were asking people to work less,” Gino says. “It’s counterintuitive, because you think you want to use those 15 minutes to keep working, but it actually leads to performance.”

The study sprang from the experiences Gino and her colleagues have had as instructors. After each class she teaches, she takes time to debrief, noting the comments students made and what points of hers led to quality discussions. She then folds those insights into the next class she teaches.

That daily routine is easy to replicate across industries. It’s just a matter of making an appointment with yourself to reflect on the day’s successes so you can incorporate those lessons into the next day.

It’s like the process of “iteration” that startup folks are always talking about. You introduce a stimulus, gather the data of your experience, and then improve from there.

But you shouldn’t be keeping the learning in your head, Gino cautions. Take the extra step and write it down.

• knowledge about the subject at hand, like math, history, or programming

• knowledge about how learning actually works

The bad news: Our education system kinda skips one of them, which is terrifying, given that your ability to learn is such a huge predictor of success in life, from achieving in academics to getting ahead at work. It all requires mastering skill after skill.

“Parents and educators are pretty good at imparting the first kind of knowledge,” shares psych writer Annie Murphy Paul. “We’re comfortable talking about concrete information: names, dates, numbers, facts. But the guidance we offer on the act of learning itself — the ‘metacognitive’ aspects of learning — is more hit-or-miss, and it shows.”

To wit, new education research shows that low-achieving students have “substantial deficits” in their understanding of the cognitive strategies that allow people to learn well. This, Paul says, suggests that part of the reason students perform poorly is that they don’t know a lot about how learning actually works.

So let’s cut through that lore. Here are learning strategies that really work.

Force yourself to recall.

The least-fun part of effective learning is that it’s hard. In fact, the “Make It Stick” authors contend that when learning if difficult, you’re doing your best learning, in the same way that lifting a weight at the limit of your capacity makes you strongest.

It’s simple, though not easy, to take advantage of this: force yourself to recall a fact. Flashcards are a great ally in this, since they force you to supply answers.

Don’t fall for fluency.

When you’re reading something and it feels easy, what you’re experiencing is fluency.

It’ll only get you in trouble.

Example: Say, for instance, you’re at the airport and you’re trying to remember which gate your flight to Chicago is waiting for you at. You look at the terminal monitors — it’s B44. You think to yourself, oh, B44, that’s easy. Then you walk away, idly check your phone, and instantly forget where you’re going.

The alternative: You read the gate number. Then you turn away from the monitor and ask yourself, what’s the gate? If you can recall that it’s B44, you’re good to go.

Connect the new thing to the old things.

“The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge,” the “Make It Stick” authors write, “the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.”

When you’re weaving in new threads into your pre-existing web of knowledge, you’re elaborating.

One killer technique is to come up with real-life examples of principles you’ve just uncovered. If you’ve just learned about slant rhyme, you could read poems that exhibit it. If you’ve just discovered heat transfer, you could think of the way a warm cup of cocoa disperses warmth into your hands on a cold winter’s day.

Reflect, reflect, reflect.

Looking back helps. In a Harvard Business School study, employees who were onboarded to a call center had 22.8% higher performance than the control group when they spent just 15 minutes reflecting on their work at the end of the day.

“When people have the opportunity to reflect, they experience a boost in self-efficacy,” HBS professor Francesca Gino tells us. “They feel more confident that they can achieve things. As a result, they put more effort into what they’re doing and what they learn.”

While reflecting may seem like it leads to working less, it leads to achieving more.